2024 in Review: Lueders: Musk wants us to land on Mars by 2026

MCALLEN, Texas – Elon Musk wants to land a spacecraft on Mars in 2026, his general manager at Starbase says.

Kathryn Lueders spoke about the SpaceX founder’s ambitious plans when she gave the keynote speech at the Vistas from Texas seminar co-hosted by UT-Rio Grande Valley’s Center for Border Economic Studies and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. It was held at Rio Bank’s headquarters in McAllen.

In her remarks, Lueders said SpaceX is working to make Starship, the most powerful rocket ever designed, fully and rapidly reusable.

“One of Elon’s major goals is for us to be an interplanetary species. People go, ‘well, when does he want us to do this?’ He actually wants us to land on Mars, to do our first landing on Mars in 2026.”

Lueders acknowledged that she and her team at Boca Chica have a lot of work cut out to meet this target.

“We’re going to have to get going. We’ve got a lot of steps we have go through. But I think what’s great about these goals is we are putting plans together. It’s not like this is 10 years from now. This is about, okay, well, how do we get there? How do we work through the problems? What do we need to be able to do it?” Lueders said.

“And obviously we’ll have to go through and be able to demonstrate these critical capabilities along the way, to show that we can safely conduct a mission going to Mars. But it’s that big goal and very immediate goal that forces you to, no kidding, have real plans about this.”

Lueders said the size of Starship will be beneficial when Mars is finally colonized.

“For Elon, he’s extremely passionate about, you know, colonizing Mars, which is not as crazy a thing to be talking about if you have this amount of tonnage and the launch rate and the ability to (launch) over and over again. And so… this is a team that is absolutely dreaming and is trying to figure out, how do we get to the next level. All the things we’re doing are super hard.”

Lueders, an engineer, joined SpaceX from NASA, where she led the agency’s human spaceflight program. She said she has been amazed at the speed of development at Starbase.

“For me, just seeing it over this last year and a half, going from a first orbital test that had a partial success… to being able to return both the booster and the Starship to a particular location is huge innovation and (has been done in) a very quick period of time,” she said.

“But it’s because Elon has really enabled us to be able to learn. I think sometimes people don’t… when you do FAA licensing, you’re not proving that you’re going to meet all your mission objectives. What’s really important is that you’re going to fail safely. That’s what we do. We spend a lot of time with FAA making sure that we’re going to fail safely in a way that’s not going to have an impact to public safety.”

FAA stands for Federal Aviation Administration.

Musk’s ability to embrace failure and learn from it, has been key, Lueders said.

“This is a really interesting guy, because he’s here with his customers in the room, and he’s showing them his failures and owning it and realizing that through these failures, like you’re learning,” she said. “That’s important. That learning and taking it to that next level is really what, I think, ensures that SpaceX has been able to continue to speed up their innovation over time.”

During her presentation, Lueders repeated a joke Musk told her at one of their first meetings. Only it was not really a joke because there was an element of truth to it.

“When I first met him, Elon said, ‘Kathy, what is the quickest way for you to become a millionaire in Space? You start with a billion and spend a lot of money.’ And so, the great thing about him is, when he’s got a dream, he is definitely investing in it, and he has invested a ton of money in Starbase to be able to make it a place where we can live and work and build and test and launch this new vehicle that he feels is essential to humanity.”

Editor’s Note: The above news story is the second in a three-part series based on Kathryn Lueders’ keynote speech at Vistas from Texas. Click here to read Part One.

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